The main announcement was a confirmation of rumors from late last week, in which Intel was said to be working on a "Dual OS" initiative that would put Android and Windows 8.1 on the same PC. One of the earliest systems to showcase the feature was the Asus Transformer Book Duet, and we managed to get some hands-on time with the system today.

Let's begin with the hardware, since it's mostly good: the Duet is an Ultrabook that borrows the tapered design and sensible, well-laid-out chiclet keyboard from Asus' Zenbook Ultrabooks. It uses Haswell Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs and comes with 4GB of RAM (a bit light, but workable) and a 13.3-inch screen available in either 1366×768 or 1920×1080 resolution. The laptop weighs 4.2 pounds, which is a bit on the heavy side for a 13-inch Ultrabook, but it's not gigantic. The biggest weight-related issue comes from putting the main system components in the lid of the laptop rather than the base, which gives the laptop a very different balance from most conventional Ultrabooks.

Enlarge/ Pressing one button in the hinge allows you to separate the lid from the base.

Enlarge/ The lid is a black textured plastic. The power button and volume rocker are on the lid toward the top-right edge (or top-left, if you're looking at the screen).

Andrew Cunningham

The components are kept behind the glass because the screen detaches from the base to become a tablet, which has become common among convertible PCs since Windows 8 came out in 2012. The screen is a little large as a dedicated tablet, but the textured, rubberized plastic on the back of the lid feels fine in your hands, and the weight should be fine for one-handed use. The hinge design is unremarkable—it's not too bulky, and pushing one button is all you need to do to separate the lid from the base.

The first sign of oddity can be observed if you look at the default partition scheme. The tablet has either 64GB or 128GB of solid-state storage integrated into the lid, split up into a few partitions: Windows is on one, Android 4.2.2 is on another (no one could tell us anything concrete about update plans), and a resizable "Shared disk" partition is used to share data between Windows and Android (it's set to 4GB by default). In other words, there's no direct, automatic sharing of photos, documents, or other app data between the two operating systems.

Enlarge/ A dedicated hardware keyboard switches between the two operating systems. A software button for tablet mode is also available.

Andrew Cunningham

A spinning hard drive between 320GB and 1TB in size is stored in the base of the laptop as a sort of external storage partition, scattering users' data to the winds yet further. Among power users, it's not all that unusual to keep your operating system on one partition and most of your data on another so that you don't have to worry about your data if your OS gets hosed. Consumers tend to keep everything on a single partition, though, introducing more potential for confusion.

Switching between the two operating systems is accomplished by hitting a dedicated hardware button on the keyboard or tapping a software button on the screen. The switch isn't instantaneous, but it only takes a couple of seconds to jump back and forth. One nice thing about this implementation as opposed to previous two-OS products from Asus is that Android is running on the Haswell CPU and not a secondary ARM chip, which is great for performance—Intel's integrated graphics pale in comparison to high-end cards from AMD and Nvidia, but they're still much quicker than even the best-of-the-best integrated GPUs from the ARM chipmakers (this is to be expected; Intel's Ultrabook-class chips are physically larger and use more power).

Enlarge/ The Transformer Book Duet runs Android 4.2.2. Vague promises about future updates were all we could get from Asus.

In any case, what you get with the Transformer Book Duet is less an all-in-one system that seamlessly integrates your favorite Android apps with your favorite Windows ones and more a device that can be a Windows PC or an Android device—but never both at once. We're not saying there's no audience for this kind of product, but as we've written before, this is a feature that will only appeal to a certain subset of enthusiasts. There's too much awkwardness and potential for confusion around the switching mechanism otherwise.

Asus' meeting rooms had plenty of other hardware that showed off how good the company's less experimental products can be: the Zenbook UX301-series laptops are beautifully constructed, if somewhat pricey, Ultrabooks. The company makes some very well-reviewed, high-end Wi-Fi routers. We even got a look at the M70 desktop PC, a tower that integrates actually useful features like an integrated UPS, top-mounted wireless charging pad, and NFC that can be used to authenticate to your desktop with your phone or tablet. The company's efforts to marry Windows and Android have historically been clunky implementations for power users only, and Intel's blessing does nothing to make the feature more palatable for the mass market.

89 Reader Comments

The article says, towards the end "more a device that can be a Windows PC or and Android device but never both at once". I believe it should read " more a device that can be a Windows PC or an Android device but never both at once".

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

Sure, you can just use hyper-v or another virtualization solution. However, I'm guessing Intel's solution is going to be faster.

Personally, I can't see why they didn't just make android a hosted hyper-v instance out of the box. Given how much more powerful this device is than most android devices, I don't think you'd see any performance issues with the VM. It would also avoid ANY latency in switching between worlds.

I'm really interested to see battery life on these. I currently have an Asus T100 and while the hardware is amazing and the OS works great the case is shit. It would be fantastic to have better materials and an extra disk.

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

Yes, it's the standard setup on most servers these days. Microsoft is even using it on the Xbox to separate games from other stuff running on the hardware.

It's called a "hypervisor" and there are many products available, open source and commercial.

You need a lot of RAM though, and this ultra book doesn't have much. A typical hypervisor server will have ~$10,000 spent on RAM chips.

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

Yes, it's the standard setup on most servers these days. Microsoft is even using it on the Xbox to separate games from other stuff running on the hardware.

It's called a "hypervisor" and there are many products available, open source and commercial.

You need a lot of RAM though, and this ultra book doesn't have much. A typical hypervisor server will have ~$10,000 spent on RAM chips.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Certainly Xbox doesn't have $10,000 worth of RAM? Any reason why I can run a couple of guest VMs on a host with 16GB of RAM? We're not talking here about enterprise deployment but just running Windows and Android on one machine.

I like the idea of a convertible with an SSD in the screen and a hard drive in the base. Not so sure about the split android/windows facility though.

FWIW, at my workplace we have seven servers running the HyperV hypervisor, three have 64gb RAM, the other four have 256gb. We spent a lot more on storage than we did RAM in both cases but we spent nothing like £10k on RAM

I like the concept a lot, convertible laptop/tablet, the SSD in the tablet with a rust drive in the base, solid. I would especially love if the laptop base had a dGPU.

But I'm failing to see what the Android need is for, seems like it's overly complicates things, eats up SSD space I would want for windows (both the android and shared partitions) and I don't see the benefit of combining it in one device like this.

Just leave it at a Win8.1 convertible - this would probably be the best implementation of that I have seen so far.

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

You can, but as others have mentioned you would be running on a hypervisor. You would also require a 2nd GPU to pass through to the guest when you launch it. One GPU to display the hypervisor or "host" and a 2nd GPU to drive 3D performance on the "guest".

GPU passthrough is in no way ready for a consumer device. It's still too quirky, but it's getting there quite fast.

The only other way would be, as others have mentioned, is to install Hyper-V or XenServer or VMWare's ESXi, which wouldn't work as you can't directly view the guests from those hypervisors (you typically connect to the "console" - aka the VM's graphical display) from another system.

As this system is trying to take advantage of 3D in some fashion with the integrated Intel GPU it would actually hurt performance in this device as it is tailored to the consumer.

Now, one thing that could have been considered is some type of type-2 hypervisor for Android running on a Windows host with some shared storage. Virtualbox comes to mind. The thing to keep in mind here is what the company is trying to do with the device in the consumer market. Hypervisors in the scenarios above would bring in a lot of overhead and things that could go wrong for the general consumer, so my take is that they opted to go this route.

Any way to run a master OS on top of which you simultaneously run Windows and Android as virtual machines? You could even dedicate three cores to Windows and one to Android. Or heck, just run Android as a guest of Windows. A full-sized x86 chip will be so much faster than an ARM chip that the experience should still be wicked fast.

You can, but as others have mentioned you would be running on a hypervisor. You would also require a 2nd GPU to pass through to the guest when you launch it. One GPU to display the hypervisor or "host" and a 2nd GPU to drive 3D performance on the "guest".

GPU passthrough is in no way ready for a consumer device. It's still too quirky, but it's getting there quite fast.

The only other way would be, as others have mentioned, is to install Hyper-V or XenServer or VMWare's ESXi, which wouldn't work as you can't directly view the guests from those hypervisors (you typically connect to the "console" - aka the VM's graphical display) from another system.

As this system is trying to take advantage of 3D in some fashion with the integrated Intel GPU it would actually hurt performance in this device as it is tailored to the consumer.

Now, one thing that could have been considered is some type of type-2 hypervisor for Android running on a Windows host with some shared storage. Virtualbox comes to mind. The thing to keep in mind here is what the company is trying to do with the device in the consumer market. Hypervisors in the scenarios above would bring in a lot of overhead and things that could go wrong for the general consumer, so my take is that they opted to go this route.

So it's really a GPU issue. Too bad GPUs are so bad at context switching. It would be interesting to see something akin to Optimus here in that each OS thinks it's got a real GPU but the lanes actually only connect to one at a time. I guess if you're not trying to run Android inside a window in Windows that should work, no? So long as Android is full screen it actually takes full control of the GPU - the Windows box is left with a driver stub that thinks it's still connected even though it's not.

I like the idea of a convertible with an SSD in the screen and a hard drive in the base. Not so sure about the split android/windows facility though.

FWIW, at my workplace we have seven servers running the HyperV hypervisor, three have 64gb RAM, the other four have 256gb. We spent a lot more on storage than we did RAM in both cases but we spent nothing like £10k on RAM

I don't like the idea. Even experienced users are going to forget they have left data they may need when they take it with them as a tablet. It's going to confuse people.

I like the idea of a convertible with an SSD in the screen and a hard drive in the base. Not so sure about the split android/windows facility though.

FWIW, at my workplace we have seven servers running the HyperV hypervisor, three have 64gb RAM, the other four have 256gb. We spent a lot more on storage than we did RAM in both cases but we spent nothing like £10k on RAM

I don't like the idea. Even experienced users are going to forget they have left data they may need when they take it with them as a tablet. It's going to confuse people.

How many drives do you have on your PC?

PC users are used to having multiple drives.

No one has external drives in their networks?No one has a NAS?No one has DVD drive, CD drive, Floppy Drive (Alright, this one is starting to disappear), zip drives etc.etc.

Do you take your external drives or NAS with you when you take your laptop somewhere?

I can't answer that directly, but I am wondering if this is an indicator that hardware manufacturers are losing confidence in Windows and want to hedge their bets (and provide products for customers who are doing the same).

I can't answer that directly, but I am wondering if this is an indicator that hardware manufacturers are losing confidence in Windows and want to hedge their bets (and provide products for customers who are doing the same).

No, they just don't want to take the responsibility to educate the users that Windows 8.1 is perfectly workable on a tablet form (many will even argue better than in desktop). People associate Android with the instant on mobile devices like phones and tablets and Windows is the slow booting laptops and desktops, changing that perception takes lots of effort and time, which frankly I doubt the OEM would even care to spend a dime on, but instead would prefer to cash in on the ignorance instead, such as in this case, IMO.

I can't answer that directly, but I am wondering if this is an indicator that hardware manufacturers are losing confidence in Windows and want to hedge their bets (and provide products for customers who are doing the same).

Well manufacturers have been making android tablets for over 2 years now, they didn't need Dual Boot OS to do that .

This is simply Intel looking out for itself, they're having a hard time breaking into the android tablet market and they cannot go to an OEM and say , "hey , drop that cheap ARM processors you're using for your tablets and use our more expensive i5/i7 processor instead " so they use Windows as a pawn..

If you are a pro, then act like one, and not the child he hints you may be.

If the article was written like a pro, and not like an attack piece by an Apple fanboy then maybe.

But I get tired of poor reporting when it comes to Android.

Why are you whining about Apple? Apple was not mentioned in the article at all, yet you insist on bringing it up.

1. Daz2042 is under the uninformed impression that owners of Apple products have never used a computer that has more than one OS. This ties into Daz's snide remark that the dual OS Asus Transformer Book Duet;

Quote:

would be confusing for an Apple user.

Such a claim about all Apple users is absurd. - The Mac has always been a small market share OS. And since 1994 Apple has tried to have Windows run on Macs through either hardware cards, booting a different OS or a software VM. - Current Macs can run Windows either through Boot Camp or through a VM such as Parallels. Macs can also run Linux.

In my experience in IS, in the last 20 years almost all Mac users I knew were knowledgeable about Windows.

2. Daz2042 is also uninformed about Andrew. Daz2042 is claiming that since Andrew reports on Apple products on Ars that Andrew is an;

Quote:

"Apple fanboy".

- I think Andrew is fair in his reporting but that isn't going to be accepted by someone like Daz2042.- The sad reality is that any Ars writers who regularly report about Apple and Apple products are going to be trashed by certain people who have a lot of blind hate for that company.

No one has external drives in their networks?No one has a NAS?No one has DVD drive, CD drive, Floppy Drive (Alright, this one is starting to disappear), zip drives etc.etc.

Do you take your external drives or NAS with you when you take your laptop somewhere?

Then why are you confused?

The average end user typically has just one partition/drive which they use for everything, except when they have to move something to another system, which is when they use a USB thumb drive (used to be floppy). The optical drive is rarely used for anything else except installing new applications, and if they have a laptop like most people these days, it may not even have an optical drive. Some may use it for ripping audio CDs or watching DVDs, but even those uses are becoming less common. NAS is still not that common in home use and usually only households with at least one "power user" have one.

I like the concept a lot, convertible laptop/tablet, the SSD in the tablet with a rust drive in the base, solid. I would especially love if the laptop base had a dGPU.

But I'm failing to see what the Android need is for, seems like it's overly complicates things, eats up SSD space I would want for windows (both the android and shared partitions) and I don't see the benefit of combining it in one device like this.

Just leave it at a Win8.1 convertible - this would probably be the best implementation of that I have seen so far.

What is the value of Windows here?

I like the concept a lot, convertible laptop/tablet, the SSD in the tablet with a rust drive in the base, solid. I would especially love if the laptop base had a *bigger battery".

But I'm failing to see what the Windows need is for, seems like it's overly complicates things, eats up SSD space I would want for Android (both the android and shared partitions) and I don't see the benefit of combining it in one device like this.

Just leave it at a Android convertible - this would probably be the best implementation of that I have seen so far

I like the concept a lot, convertible laptop/tablet, the SSD in the tablet with a rust drive in the base, solid. I would especially love if the laptop base had a dGPU.

But I'm failing to see what the Android need is for, seems like it's overly complicates things, eats up SSD space I would want for windows (both the android and shared partitions) and I don't see the benefit of combining it in one device like this.

Just leave it at a Win8.1 convertible - this would probably be the best implementation of that I have seen so far.

unless i'm missing smthing, i think the Asus T100 is what you're looking for already on the market

options and diversity are a good thing, but in this case it looks like it's TOO MUCH of a good thing.

mixing two OSs is just lazy work on the part of the OEM

just stick with one platform (whichever that is) and provide added value through quality hardware, software or services. this will help the platform and further improve sales. Nokia / WP and Samsung / Android are both good examples of this approach, so much so that they've become almost indistinguishable from their respective platforms. Apple is a special case, but they also follow this pattern.